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Ten budget inkjet printers

Bargain basement all-in-ones

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Epson Stylus Office BX305FW Plus

If you need an all-in-one with an ADF and fax facilities in your home office, there are budget machines like this one. It has a two-line, mono LCD and a slightly crowded control panel, but there’s also a memory card slot and fax quick-dials. Epson quotes silly speeds and I saw 3.8ppm (black) and 1.3ppm (colour), which is slow and very slow, respectively.

Print quality is fair, but with some fuzziness on black text. Ink costs are 2.6p for black and 9.5p for colour, which are a little high. The printer has recently been reduced in price, but not quite as far as the Lexmark Interpret S405.

HP Deskjet 3050A

A discreet little all-in one, with its light grey body and two-tone brown top. Unusually for HP, paper flows from a tray at the back to a fold-down tray at the front. Also unusually, It has a hinged control panel with a mono LCD display and membrane control buttons around the edges. The screen uses an ugly font, but is otherwise very serviceable, and there’s wireless as well as USB, with software for mobile print.

HP claims an honest 5.5ppm and 4ppm for black and colour print and I measured 6.4ppm and 2.2ppm, both reasonable. Print quality is OK, with a good draft mode, but ink costs are high, at 4.8p per black page and 11.8p per colour one.